Another year has already passed. Unfortunately I have not come up with anything new regarding the FED NKAP but I noticed Jacques changed the wiki.
It used to be:
201759 __ 01000/132 ___________ private
now this lens is used by another camera.
201657 __ 01000/132 ___________ eBay
What caused this change?
Interestingly the new pairing fits way better into my regression line. It is an excellent fit with a R² of 0,94 (1 is max).
What we see here are 13 pairs of FED NKAP cameras with a 4-digit #0XXX lens. One from Jacques was omitted as he states the pairing is not original and a macro lens.
http://www.ussrphoto.com/UserContent2/462021_FED NKAP camera-lens 06_21.png
For the 2nd NKAP batch from about #200.500 onward these lenses apparently were paired with cameras in a specific way.
We would expect camera serials to start at 200.000 and lens serials at 1 and then roughly rise 1:1. For every camera serial the lens serial rises per one on average with more or less equal outliers grouping left and right as they poured together batches of cameras and lenses.
But obviously this cannot be true as quite some Red Flag cameras come with different lenses.
Now while the 13 cam-lens pairs with reasonable 3-4digit numbers group very well along a regression line pretty much like with the FED-S, things do not work as expected. Apparently it takes more than one camera serial numbers for the lens serial number to rise by one!
The blue line is the calculated regression for our samples - with a slope of 0.64 it lies between 2:1 and 3:2. Assuming 2:1, camera serial rises 200, lens serial rises only 100. Clearly these lenses were not paired randomly with cameras.
But this only works for the 2nd NKAP batch with sharp-edged top plates and shiny chrome from around #200.500 onward. There are only two samples for the first batch and they are unusually high lens serial numbers for these early cameras. Curiously the regression line pretty much hits zero on both axes, so if we moved back to camera #200.000 in this pairing scheme of batch2 we would theoretically arrive at lens #0001. But in the real world, the 'primitive' batch1 with the blunt edged top plate and dull chrome up to about #200.500 behaves differently.
So what happened here?
I have no idea. We see something like this in the FED-S where roughly every 10th camera was picked to get paired with a 50/2 lens - at a constant ratio from mid 'c' to late 'e'.
With at least the 2nd batch of Red Flags it seems only every 2nd camera was paired with this type of lens, or 2 out of 3, or a mixture which changed over time. But not every camera.
Remember we seem to have 2 Red Flag batches - up until about #200.500 the blunt edged rangefinder housing with coarse chrome and afterwards the normal sharp-edged one with better chrome. It is possible something regarding lens-pairing changed in between, we currently have a big hole there and early data is very poor.
Still I cannot explain what is going on in the 2nd batch from 200.800 onward. Obviously they produced all serials, we see odd and even last numbers. So the only explanation is - they produced cameras in very small batches and not every one but only every second or 2 out of 3 were paired with this type of lens. The others received either other lenses or none at all. Indeed we see a number of cameras with higher-number 4digit lenses and some early ones with NKVD lenses. No idea if these are original but it makes some sense that they could not keep up with lens production. Making glass and grinding/polishing lenses is a big deal, way more than machining camera parts.
But again I cannot explain how they managed to retain the lens-camera ratio other than 1:1 over considerable time (pairs group along a straight line), not in the Red Flag and absolutely not in the FED-S. But it seems they had a well working system involving small batches of a few dozen cameras/lenses. Also for both FED-S and Red Flag it seems the pairing got tighter in later version while being more random in the beginning.
We just don't know how this was achieved or above all - why?
Alternative hypothesis:
The lens:camera serial ratio for 2nd batch is indeed roughly 1:1 and we are just seeing a lot of outliers.
Things would look like this.
http://www.ussrphoto.com/UserContent2/462021_FED NKAP camera-lens 06_21 1-1.png
Impossible? Certainly not. Maybe the ratio was unstable an the beginning and flattened out towards the end. We saw something similar in FED-S'c'. Curiously this way the regression line reaches zero (or the hypothetical lens #0001) close to #200.500 where we expect the 2nd batch to start. This however excludes this lens type from the first batch meaning the two samples we see there are not original. Not improbable.
We only have 13 samples out of about 2000 produced Red Flag cameras, that's 0.65%
For the 2nd batch, omitting the beginning, 10 samples out of about 1000 which is 1% and not bad for such statistics. And these 10 form a pretty straight line to me.
Whatever happened, the take-home message is:
The 4-digit 0XXX lenses are most likely the original ones produced for the Red Flag. We cannot say if others were used in the factory. Probably at least in the 1st batch. The 2nd batch looks much more refined and behaves differently so frankly I would not be surprised if they only managed to produce these lenses for the 2nd batch and used other ones for the first, or none at all at time of production.
I remain sceptical about the entire 'reuse of pre-war parts' theory. It seems clear now that the parts for the 1st batch of Red Flag were built from scratch after the war. They did not reuse any significant FED1 parts - most likely because none of these made it to Berdsk.
My best guess is that they built the first batch of 500 cameras (mostly) without lenses as lens production lagged behind. Maybe they outfitted some cameras with old FED lenses they managed to acquire for display but organized production most likely only started with the refined 2nd batch. Which explains why the two 4-didig lens serials in the 1st batch cameras we know are unusually high. They were paired later - but maybe still at the factory during batch2 production when they managed to make lenses.
It's a shame we are still missing so many lens serial numbers. Should we at least add the ones we have to the wiki now, Jacques?
And thanks for the photos.